Royall Tyler, author of The Contrast, evidently the first (or some say the second) American play (a comedy) performed in public by professional actors, was the next native American sonneteer, though with a far different approach to the ancient form than that taken by Col. Humphreys:
Sonnet to an Old Mouser
Child of lubricious art, of sanguine sport!
Of pangful mirth! sweet ermin'd sprite!
Who lov'st, with silent, velvet step, to court
The bashful bosom of the night.
Whose elfin eyes can pierce night's sable gloom,
And witch her fairy prey with guile,
Who sports fell frolic o'er the grisly tomb,
And gracest death with dimpling smile!
Daughter of ireful mirth, sportive in rage,
Whose joy should shine in sculptur'd bas relief
Like Patience, in rapt Shakespeare's deathless page,
Smiling in marble at wan grief.
Oh, come, and teach me all thy barb'rous joy,
To sport with sorrow first, and then destroy.
The original Italian sonnets had either the rhyme scheme abababab cdecde or abbaabba cde cde, sometimes with the final sestet modified either cdedce or cdcdcd. Whatever the rhyming custom followed, the poem was extremely formal in its structure. There was always a full stop between the octave and the sestet, a custom carried over into the English sonnet and thought immutable until Milton carried a single thought or emotion through his sonnets without the historical break between octave and sestet.
Before the sonnet became fully anglicized and set in its conventional 14-line iambic pentameter with the abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme pattern, Sidney wrote many sonnets in hexameters (i.e. "Loving in truth, and fair in verse my love to show,) and Shakespeare wrote an octosyllabic sonnet ("Those lips that Love's own hand did make"). Poets throughout the sonnet's history, have played with the sacrosanct laws of the sonnet. Poe's "Sonnet-Silence" is fifteen lines long; Edwin Honig's "For an Immigrant Grandmother" is written in iambic heptameter; Robert Hayden's "Frederick Douglas", William Bronk's "The Mask The Wearer of the Mask Wears", and Daryl Hine's "August 13, 1966" are all written in blank verse; Frank Sidgwick's "Aeronaut to His Lady" is written in monometer:
An Aeronaut to His Lady
I
Through
Blue
Sky
Fly
To
You.
Why?
Sweet
Love,
Feet
Move
So
Slow.
Perhaps the only way to define the modern sonnet is by looking at each possible sonnet individually to ascertain its author's intent. Sidgwick's poem would not be, and is not, classified as a sonnet by strict definition, but surely such a structured poem, though deceptively simple-appearing, was intended by its writer to be a sonnet. Even the old octave-sestet division is formally met, and the rhyme pattern is based on an ancient Italian model.
More later. . .
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